Fiber and foam panels or mats are well known and widely used throughout the construction and automotive industries as thermal and sound insulating material. Such panels or mats are manufactured from a wide variety of fibers and foams, such as compressed wood, cork, cane, rock wool, gypsum, or glass fibers, and foams. Typically, the formed mats are used in wall or ceiling construction as sound absorbers in mechanical suspension systems, and sound insulating and transmittance reducing media.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, the transportation industry primarily used glass fiber batts to provide sound insulation in vehicles. However, as a result of irritation to workers handling the mats the industry has moved to using less irritating foam mats. Unfortunately, although the foam is less irritating and is roughly comparable in cost to the glass fiber batts, the foam has the disadvantage that it is not easily recyclable.
Most foam fiber mats are typically a multilayer product of glass and foam; thus the main impediment to recycling of foam is the fact that the layers of glass and foam would need to be separated before recycling could be attempted. An added disadvantage with foam is that due to the layering in foam the fiber mats can be more complicated to mold.
Recently, attempts have been made to produce insulating mats for the transportation industry from polyester since, unlike foam, the polyester fiber mats would be recyclable. To date, the polyester fiber mats produced for the transportation industry have a basis weight of about 140-144 g/ft.sup.2. Due to the high basis weight such polyester fiber mats are uneconomical and have not been adopted by the industry despite the environmental advantages. Thus a need exists for a method of producing an economical insulating fiber molding media that meets or exceeds environmental and handling criteria while still maintaining physical property requirements. These needs are met by the resin stabilized polymeric fiber molding media of the invention.